WRITING IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH
Dickens was in the thick of an intense debate about the punishment of Britain’s criminals
No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness, nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in 50 other shapes.” When, in July 1840, Dickens attended the public execution of François Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russell, the reaction of the crowd that gathered to gawp at the spectacle left the author both shocked and appalled.
The punishment of criminals was transformed during Dickens’s lifetime. His condemnation of capital punishment for minor offences in Barnaby Rudge (1841) was published at the end of the dismantlement of the notorious ‘Bloody Code’. By the 1840s, the capital sanction remained for just a handful of serious offences, and in practice only murderers were hanged.
But as Dickens discovered when he, along with some 30,000 others, gathered outside Newgate Prison to watch Courvoisier hang, the relative rarity of a public execution only increased its appeal.
Despite the “particular detestation” that he felt towards Courvoisier, Dickens concluded an editorial letter penned for the Daily News with a plea for the “total abolition of the Punishment of Death, as a general principle, for the advantage of society, [and] for the prevention of crime”.
Just three years later, Dickens had changed his mind. His letters to The Times on the execution of the murderers Frederick and Maria Manning pressed for the privatisation of hanging, rather than its total abolition. While his new position attracted the ire of campaigners, Dickens was not out of step with his contemporaries, many of whom had retreated from a position of complete abolition in the hope of achieving a change in the law.
Suffering in silence
Dickens also become embroiled in a controversy over prison discipline that erupted in the late 1830s. The desire to exert greater control over prisoners through the elimination of contact between them led to the emergence of two rival systems: silence and separation. In late 1842, Dickens
published his account of a visit to Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where the purest form of separate confinement was practised. Inmates were locked in solitary cells, sometimes for years, with their Bibles and work, the slow march of time punctuated only by occasional visits from moral agents. “I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong,” he wrote. Solitary confinement was a mental torture which led to insanity.
Dickens’ travelogue American Notes (1842) appeared in the months before the opening of Pentonville Prison, which shared Eastern Penitentiary’s faith in solitary confinement and religious instruction. Dickens’ opposition to such practices remained undimmed. An intensive focus on the soul of the individual, he observed, encouraged a “strange, absorbing selfishness – a spiritual egotism and vanity”. Prisoners were either deceiving themselves, or hoodwinking chaplains.
Dickens’ critique reached a climax in the final instalment of his serialised novel David Copperfield, when the hero pays a visit to a thinly disguised Pentonville and encounters Uriah Heep, performing the role of the penitent prisoner. The “rattling fun of the caricature told powerfully on the British public”, prison reformer Walter Clay later wrote, hastening the demise of the obsession with solitary confinement.
Prolonged solitary confinement was a mental torture that led to insanity